Portland Mayor Keith Wilson lays out how he will end unsheltered homelessness in the city

One of Mayor Keith Wilson’s main campaign platforms was his commitment to ending unsheltered homelessness in the city. On Wednesday, he presented his $28 million “Blueprint” for how he plans to achieve that goal. OPB Portland City Government Reporter Alex Zielinski joins us to share details about the plan and the reaction of regional officials and homeless experts who have been working to get people off the streets for decades.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Portland Mayor Keith Wilson was elected in November, based largely on his pledge to end homeless camping on Portland’s streets within a year. Yesterday, he released his $28 million plan for how he hopes to accomplish that goal. As expected, the centerpiece is a huge increase in nighttime shelters – 3,000 more beds by the end of this year, half of which currently have no funding.

The mayor introduced his proposal in two meetings with regional officials and the new city council yesterday. OPB’s Portland politics reporter Alex Zielinski was on hand, and she’s with me now. It’s good to have you back.

Alex Zielinski: Thanks for having me.

Miller: Can you just walk us, first, through the basics of the mayor’s plan?

Zielinski: Sure. So he’s wanting to open up a number of nighttime-only shelters, like you mentioned, across the county, enough to accommodate an estimated 6,000 people currently living outside in Multnomah County. There are about 3,000 other shelter beds already running, by city or county in the region. So he’s focused on creating about 3,000 new shelter beds by December 1. And he also wants to open four day centers for people experiencing homelessness, one in each city council district, and storage facilities for people living outside. It’s a big package.

Miller: Is there a ballpark figure for how many individual facilities we’re talking about here?

Zielinski: No. I mean, he’s really focusing on beds, not really the buildings themselves. He’s focused on … How many buildings is kind of an afterthought. It is how many people can be held in these buildings? Right now, there’s kind of a prototype with these two different shelters that are run by the Salvation Army for the winter. And one of them has 150 people staying there. Another one has 50. So I guess, using that as an example, it could be anywhere between 10 or 30 buildings.

Miller: Who would actually be running these sites?

Zielinski: That’s a great question. The city would be paying for most of it, but they’d be overseen by providers that already kind of run shelters in town, like Central City Concern, Transition Projects, folks with the experience to do this work already. They’ve already been meeting with the mayor to kind of be briefed on this stuff. No one’s committed to it yet.

Miller: What has the mayor said about enforcement of the city’s camping ban? I mean, how does that connect to this increase in nighttime shelters?

Zielinski: Right, so this is part of the proposal. His timeline that he laid out this week notes that once the city has ramped up nighttime shelters in December, the city will begin enforcing this law, which prohibits camping on public land. But what’s interesting is he’s put a lot of emphasis on not involving police in this plan. He wants outreach workers to be the first point of contact for people who might be violating the policy, and seems to believe that will be enough to get people moving. It’s uncertain how effective that will be to accomplish what he says he wants to do, which is an end to public camping in the city, though.

Miller: In the morning, he introduced his plan to a group of county and city officials who are partnering on responding to unsheltered homelessness. That included County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson. What did she say about this plan?

Zielinski: She had a lot of questions about Wilson’s cost estimates for this plan. As you know, the county has overseen shelter operations in the region for a while, so they have a good idea of how much this can cost. And Vega Pederson thinks Wilson’s estimate might be low. She urged him to triple check the price tag before moving forward because if it’s underestimated, that means the city and county will need to find more money in the future and there’s not much there.

Miller: As you reported, another big point that came up in that morning meeting – this is from the county’s homeless response director Jillian Schoene – was skepticism about the whole idea of separating nighttime and daytime shelters. What was her argument?

Zielinski: She was looking at the numbers, the budget, and said that the cost of operating one nighttime and one daytime shelter was about the same as the cost of operating just one shelter open 24/7. So she asked to have a bigger discussion about why fund one over the other.

Miller: How has the mayor responded to this? I mean, why has he said he is so focused on nighttime shelters, nighttime-only shelters, with a few daytime shelter options, as opposed to 24-hour shelters?

Zielinski: He thinks that there are going to be more people who need night shelters than day shelters. So he thinks that opening a 24-hour facility might be an unnecessary cost. There’ll be not as many people needing it during the day as they would in the night. His big argument here is that the city and county have a bunch of 24-hour shelters already running, but its missing piece is night shelters, that these could really fill the gap in the region’s holistic response to homelessness. It’s a form of triage, really, to the crisis of people sleeping on city streets.

Miller: You also heard pushback at this morning meeting yesterday from Marisa Zapata – who’s been on the show a number of times in the past – the director of Portland State University’s Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative. What did she have to say?

Zielinski: Yeah, she studied the causes and solutions to homelessness for years, so she’s a bit of a local expert on this. And she wanted to know what the mayor’s plan was for people after shelter, that creating more shelter is certainly a piece of the puzzle, but it won’t end unsheltered homelessness unless it sets people on a path to permanent housing – which Portland is in short supply of.

Miller: Did he have an answer to that?

Zielinski: Well, again, he really drives home the pitch that this isn’t a plan to end homelessness, period. It’s just to end the practice of people sleeping outside by offering shelter space. He did say he’s working with housing providers in the city’s housing bureau to make sure there’s a through line from shelter, but he’s also realistic that the city can’t build enough affordable housing in time to meet the demand.

Miller: How far out does this plan go? I mean, how long does the mayor propose to run these shelters?

Zielinski: So that’s interesting. It’s just a two-year plan, for now. It suggests running until June 2027. And that second year will require another investment – an estimated $25 million. Wilson’s pitch is to start closing down some of these nighttime shelters as early as next March because he anticipates the demand decreasing … which is interesting because, like I said, he’s not explicitly pairing this plan with housing. So it’s not clear why he’s certain the number of people experiencing homelessness will begin to drop at that point. And that was a big question raised by Portland city councilors who questioned this plan yesterday.

Miller: So let’s turn to that. So in the afternoon, the mayor … This was after that regional meeting in the morning, [it] was something like five hours of meetings total.

Zielinski: It was a lot.

Miller: He presented his proposal to the city council. Before we get to the specifics, I mean, is it fair to say that this was the most consequential public meeting so far between the new mayor and the new 12-person council?

Zielinski: It’s hard to say. There’s just been a lot that this new body has had to sift through in the last couple of weeks. So my scale of what’s the most consequential has really changed because, yeah, we’ve been creating this new form of government ...

Miller: A lot of it, though, has been about how the government is going to function.

Zielinski: Right. Not what it will do.

Miller: Exactly. So I’m just curious what the vibe was like.

Zielinski: Yeah, I mean it maybe sounds a little cliche, but it’s fair to say that the chambers were buzzing with anticipation. Ending unsheltered homelessness, like you said, was Wilson’s big ticket plan that propelled him into the mayor’s office. Everyone, including city council members, city staff, homeless providers, have been waiting to hear how he intends to do it. At the same time, most city councilors also campaigned on a pledge to end and address homelessness, so they wanted to see how Wilson’s plan could help them deliver their promises.

They had a bunch of questions for Wilson after his presentation – [a] couple hours long – including some issues I’ve already mentioned, like, how will this work without more housing? How will this interact with the camping ban? And if this $28 million price tag is accurate.

Miller: Right, so let’s turn to that money side because it seems like money was one of the things that got a lot of attention. What did council members focus on?

Zielinski: To zoom out a little bit, money is the big question hanging over city hall right now, more generally. Last week, the city learned it will be needing to fill a budget deficit of around $100 million in the next fiscal year, which starts July 1. That’s not going to be an easy fix. And now, hearing about this new funding ask, counselors seem a little rattled. They all seemed to ask Wilson the same question, which is, “where will this money come from?”

Miller: Can I ask you that one right now? Can we actually get a clarification? So the $100 million, that was last week’s news … something like four times bigger budget shortfall than we had been told before that.

Zielinski: Right.

Miller: This $28 million that the mayor is asking for, is that included in that $100 million or would that make it an even bigger pot of money that the city and city council need to find?

Zielinski: That would be additional. But in Wilson’s argument, he’s assuring city council that his plan won’t rely that much on the city’s general operating budget. He’s been lobbying the state legislature to help fund the proposal and turning to the federal government for support. But it’s also very unclear how much the city may have to pony up for this plan on top of their serious budget shortfall. So right now, [there’s] a lot of hopeful statements about kind of where other money might be coming from.

Miller: What did you see or hear from commissioners when the mayor said we can get this money from the state, we can get this money from the feds?

Zielinski: I don’t know if they believe in that. I think they see a huge budget hole. I mean, we heard from a number of commissioners saying, like, we hear you, we hear that this is not going to impact our budget at all, that would be fantastic. It might be aspirational, we have to really talk about this seriously. And they’re at a point right now where they might have to cut and make budget cuts, staffing cuts, serious program cuts. To hear another idea kind of floated up at this time, it’s frightening.

Miller: And just to be clear, could the mayor do this? Implement his plan without council support?

Zielinski: Technically, yes. He believes that it is his responsibility to carry out city laws, like the camping ban, and that this plan will help make it possible to enforce that law. But the city council could keep it from being funded with city money. The mayor will draft his annual budget next month, then ask for feedback from councilors. They could vote against the budget and stall that plan if they don’t agree with how it’s being funded.

At this point, it sounds like Wilson won’t be asking for something that doesn’t have council support, though. He doesn’t want this just to be a Wilson plan. Yesterday, he said he wants it to be a plan that has all of the city council members behind it.

Miller: So what’s next? I mean, what’s the timeline?

Zielinski: Yeah, I mean, it’s a fast one. The legislative session started this week. So he is planning on meeting with committees and state lawmakers to really get the show on the road, pitch the proposal to the feds – like I mentioned – and also meeting with city councilors and county commissioners to see that their input is reflected in his plan. I think like we’ve spoken about earlier, the most important next step is just finding out how to pay for any of this.

Miller: Alex, thanks very much.

Zielinski: Thank you.

Miller: That’s Alex Zielinski who covers Portland politics for OPB.

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